Lewis, who immediately took responsibility for the mistake when it was published earlier this month, has reported locally for some twenty years and was, by all accounts, well respected by colleagues and subjects alike. “We’ve consistently said this story is water under the bridge and did not ask for any actions to be taken against those involved,” said the McAuliffe campaign in a statement. “We have had a professional relationship with Bob Lewis, Dena Potter and the rest of AP’s Virginia team during thiscampaign.”

Both Virginia senators came out with words ofsupport:

AP's Bob Lewis has been a fixture at the Va Capitol and his reporting will be missed by Virginians. Best wishes at a tough moment, Bob.

In the midst of a competitive election, Lewis initially reported that McAuliffe lied to federal investigators in the case of shady associate Joseph Caramadre, but the initials “T.M.” in the relevant indictment referred to someoneelse.

"I’m hard-pressed to see how this is the right response," New York Times White House correspondent Michael Shear told Politico. "I don’t know all the facts. But on the surface, this is not plagiarism, this is not fabrication, this is not some malicious thing." Journalists have indeed kept their jobs after doing far worse. A Virginia political scientist added, "I’m not sure death penalty was appropriate here — I guess the AP is trying to send a signal about theirstandards."

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Tabloids rejoice: Patriots owner and Trump buddy Robert Kraft has been charged with soliciting prostitution

On Friday, Jupiter Police Chief Daniel Kerr confirmed to WPTV that Kraft is one of 25 men being charged with soliciting another to commit prostitution.

He confirmed that there is video evidence of all of the men being charged.

When asked if he was surprised about the arrest of Kraft, Chief Kerr said, “We’re as deeply stunned as anyone else.”

A friend of President Trump and frequent visitor to Mar-a-Lago, Kraft was in the area as recently as this past weekend, when he attended a fundraiser at The Breakers for the Everglades Foundation. Entertainment at the event included John Bon Jovi and Jimmy Buffet

New York state prosecutors have put together a criminal case against Paul Manafort that they could file quickly if the former chairman of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign receives a presidential pardon.

New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. is ready to file an array of tax and other charges against Manafort, according to two people familiar with the matter, something seen as an insurance policy should the president exercise his power to free the former aide. Skirting laws that protect defendants from being charged twice for the same offense has been one of Vance’s challenges.

Manafort was convicted of eight felonies, pleaded guilty to two more and is scheduled to be sentenced next month for those federal crimes. Prosecutors working for Special Counsel Robert Mueller have recommended as long as 24 years, a virtual life sentence, for the 69-year-old political consultant.

Google said Thursday that it will no longer bar employees from suing the company over discrimination or wrongful termination, or from joining together in class-action suits.

The change will end Google’s policy of forcing employees to litigate such disputes in arbitration, where hearings are typically closed and the arbitrators are paid for by the company. Critics say arbitration allows sexual harassers to prey on multiple victims because of the secrecy.

In November, Google waived mandatory arbitration for sexual harassment and assault claims. Thursday’s move is a significant expansion of that policy. Among other things, it will allow current Google employees to move past claims from arbitration to court. Still, recent policy improvements at Google and other tech companies arrived too late for some female employees.

Trump is mostly making good on his promise to leave Syria, but a small residual force will remain

The U.S. plans to leave a contingent of “peacekeeping” troops in Syria even after the withdrawal ordered by President Donald Trump, the White House said Thursday.

“A small peacekeeping group of about 200 will remain in Syria for a period of time,” Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement.

Neither Sanders nor a spokesman for the National Security Council detailed where the American forces would be stationed or how long they expected to remain in Syria, which has been devastated by eight years of civil war. The announcement came hours after Trump spoke by telephone with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

WASHINGTON, Feb 22 (Reuters) - U.S. Department of Agriculture has paid out $7.7 billion so far to farmers, William Northey, Undersecretary for Farm Production and Conservation, said on Friday, in aid designed to offset the negative impact of tariff imposition.

Warren and Sanders, who occupy similar places on the left, don’t seem intent on battling each other – at least yet

The run-up to their presidential announcements sparked concern on the left that having both of them in the race would split the activist base and clear the way for a more moderate nominee. Now that they’re both in, the competition between the two promises to be one of the more intriguing subplots of the primary.

Sanders starts out indisputably ahead. Bolstered by the grassroots army he amassed in 2016, the Vermont senator easily outraised Warren in the first 24 hours of their campaigns. He’s far ahead of her in the polls, too, trailing only former Vice President Joe Biden, who hasn’t announced whether he’ll run.

Sanders’ camp is treating Warren accordingly. He and his aides are avoiding any whiff of public criticism of Warren. They declined even to respond when her allies argued last week that Sanders entering the race would benefit her.

Representative Steve King, who recently mused, “White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization—how did that language become offensive?” feels he has nothing to apologize for

A defiant Rep. Steve King confirmed Thursday that he will run for a 10th term as an Iowa congressman, despite controversies over his history of caustic remarks, including about race and immigration.

The Kiron Republican has been criticized by national and state leaders of his own party, has been stripped of committee assignments in Congress and has drawn three primary challengers for the 2020 race.

In a Thursday taping of Iowa Public Television’s “Iowa Press” program, host David Yepsen asked him: “Are you sorry for anything that you’ve said?”

Don’t understand how one twin could be a U.S. citizen from birth, while the other isn’t? A federal judge didn’t get it either

A federal judge in California ruled Thursday that a twin son of a gay married couple has been an American citizen since birth, handing a defeat to the U.S. government, which had only granted the status to his brother.

The State Department was wrong to deny citizenship to 2-year-old Ethan Dvash-Banks, District Judge John F. Walter found. The lawsuit filed by the boys’ parents, Andrew and Elad Dvash-Banks, sought the same rights for Ethan that his brother, Aiden, has as a citizen.

Each boy was conceived with donor eggs and the sperm from a different father — one an American, the other an Israeli citizen — but born by the same surrogate mother minutes apart.

The government had only granted citizenship to Aiden, who DNA tests showed was the biological son of Andrew, a U.S. citizen. Ethan was conceived from the sperm of Elad Dvash-Banks, an Israeli citizen.

Christopher Hasson, the alleged white supremacist who was plotting to kill journalists and Democratic politicians, was probably caught because he did his research on a work computer

The U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant spent hours on end planning a wide-scale domestic terrorist attack, even logging in at his work computer on the job at headquarters to study the manifestos and heinous paths of mass shooters, prosecutors say. He researched how to carry out sniper attacks, they contend, and whether rifle scopes were illegal. And all the while, investigators assert, he was amassing a cache of weapons as he ruminated about attacks on politicians and journalists.

… It was only after Hasson’s arrest last Friday at his workplace that the chilling plans prosecutors assert he was crafting became apparent, detected by an internal Coast Guard program that watches for any “insider threat.”

The program identified suspicious computer activity tied to Hasson, prompting the agency’s investigative service to launch an investigation last fall, said Lt. Cmdr. Scott McBride, a service spokesman.

Signs that we’re nearing the end of single-stream recycling as we know it

The conscientious citizens of Philadelphia continue to put their pizza boxes, plastic bottles, yoghurt containers and other items into recycling bins.

But in the past three months, half of these recyclableshave been loaded on to trucks, taken to a hulking incineration facility and burned, according to the city’s government.

It’s a situation being replicated across the US as cities struggle to adapt to a recent ban by China on the import of items intended for reuse.

Until recently, China had been taking about 40% of US paper, plastics and other recyclables but this trans-Pacific waste route has now ground to a halt. In July 2017, China told the World Trade Organization it no longer wanted to be the end point for yang laji, or foreign garbage, with the country keen to grapple with its own mountains of waste.

A former member of Fox News’ “Medical A-Team” was reportedly sued by three female patients within the past year claiming he lured them into sexual relationships that degraded the women through beatings and bondage. One woman even got a tattoo featuring the doctor’s initials so that he could claim “ownership” of her.

One Ohio woman described how she received Ketamine shots from visited Ablow in 2015 to treat her depression and started having Skype sessions with him. Ablow reportedly began to ask the woman personal questions, then started asking her about her sexual preferences—specifically if she liked to be dominant or submissive.

Another former patient of Ablow’s, from New York, got a tattoo of Ablow’s initials upon his request and endured allegedly abusive behavior.

How Biden’s potential absence in 2020 could skew the chances of other contenders.

Cameron Easley, Washington editor, Morning Consult

Sanders, Harris, and Warren could be key beneficiaries of Biden’s existing support … Sanders would be the biggest beneficiary if Biden decides not to run. Twenty-four percent of the likely Democratic primary voters who said the former vice president was their first choice picked the Vermont senator as their runner-up, compared with 11 percent who opted for Kamala Harris as second choice and 10 percent who chose Elizabeth Warren.

Tim Malloy, assistant director, Quinnipiac University Poll

Take him out of the equation and Sen. Kamala Harris would appear to be the frontrunner with a virtual army of would-be Democrats, from the far left to the more moderate, assembling campaign teams and looking for an opening.

Kyle Kondik, managing editor, Sabato’s Crystal Ball

My guess is that Biden’s support would not immediately go to one person disproportionately. Maybe Bernie Sanders would benefit only because he has the most name ID (along with Biden) of the candidates. But I don’t know if that would actually make Sanders a likelier nominee; these early polls can be just a measure of name ID.

In the early going, Kamala Harris has seemed to make the biggest splash of the candidates who are not otherwise well-known nationally. That said, I do not believe there is a true frontrunner in this race as of yet.

China has been using DNA technology provided by a Massachusetts company to crack down on Uighur Muslims

China wants to make the country’s Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, more subservient to the Communist Party. It has detained up to a million people in what China calls “re-education” camps, drawing condemnation from human rights groups and a threat of sanctions from the Trump administration.

Collecting genetic material is a key part of China’s campaign, according to human rights groups and Uighur activists. They say a comprehensive DNA database could be used to chase down any Uighurs who resist conforming to the campaign.

To bolster their DNA capabilities, scientists affiliated with China’s police used equipment made by Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts company. For comparison with Uighur DNA, they also relied on genetic material from people around the world that was provided by Kenneth Kidd, a prominent Yale University geneticist.

On Wednesday, Thermo Fisher said it would no longer sell its equipment in Xinjiang, the part of China where the campaign to track Uighurs is mostly taking place. The company said separately in an earlier statement to The New York Times that it was working with American officials to figure out how its technology was being used.

John C. Fry has been charged in federal court with searching for and disseminating Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), reports filed by banks when they note potentially suspicious transactions.

Federal officials say they found telephone records that indicate Fry placed a phone call from his personal cell phone to that of Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti the day before Avenatti released details of Cohen’s financial transactions, and the day after.

According to the complaint, he conducted numerous searches related to Cohen, and downloaded five SARs, including one related to a bank account for Essential Consultants.

Tennessee Republican Governor Bill Lee, pictured right, apologizes for picture in an Auburn yearbook in which he is dressed as a Confederate solider: “With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that participating in that was insensitive and I’ve come to regret it.”

Photo: Auburn University Glomerata

2/21/2019

California’s public pension fund is a major investor in the National Enquirer, owning as much as a third of its parent company American Media Inc.

The National Enquirer has been one of President Trump’s most controversial allies, delivering scathing coverage of his opponents to super market check-out lines and funneling $150,000 to one of his alleged mistresses to buy her silence.

So it will probably come as a surprise to California state employees and taxpayers to learn they were helping fund those efforts.

During the 2016 presidential campaign, California’s massive public pension fund, CalPERS, was one of the biggest investors in the debt-laden owner of the National Enquirer, according to public records reviewed by the Los Angeles Times.

The big dollar targets for Democrats just so happen to include the four major states that went to Obama in 2012 and to Trump in 2016

.@prioritiesUSA, the largest Dem super PAC, is launching an early $100M presidential effort in FL, WI, MI, and PA, @guycecil tells reporters in DC this AM. Phase two, before the end of this year, will expand into NV, NH, AZ, NC, and GA.

One of the more voracious readers in recent presidential history, Obama will not have a traditional presidential library

The four-building, 19-acre “working center for citizenship,” set to be built in a public park on the South Side of Chicago, will include a 235-foot-high “museum tower,” a two-story event space, an athletic center, a recording studio, a winter garden, even a sledding hill.

In a break with precedent, there will be no research library on site, and none of Mr. Obama’s official presidential records. Instead, the Obama Foundation will pay to digitize the roughly 30 million pages of unclassified paper records from the administration so they can be made available online.

And the entire complex, including the museum chronicling Mr. Obama’s presidency, will be run by the foundation, a private nonprofit entity, rather than by the National Archives and Records Administration, the federal agency that administers the libraries and museums for all presidents going back to Herbert Hoover.

Republican Gov. Larry Hogan said Thursday he expects to make a springtime trip to New Hampshire as he weighs a 2020 challenge to Donald Trump — and accused the Republican National Committee of going to extraordinary lengths to shield the president from a potentially draining primary.

“Typically they try to be fair arbiters of a process and I’ve never seen anything like it and I’ve been involved in the Republican Party for most of my life. It’s unprecedented. And in my opinion it’s not the way we should be going about our politics,” Hogan, a popular two-term Maryland governor, said in an interview with POLITICO. “It’s very undemocratic and to say, ‘We’re in some cases not going to allow a debate, we may not have a primary…’”

The 62-year-old Hogan, who won reelection in liberal Maryland last year, has openly flirted with a primary challenge in recent weeks. The governor used his January inauguration speech to implicitly go after the president and to raise the specter of impeachment. He later met with conservative columnist and prominent Trump critic Bill Kristol, who has been seeking out a 2020 Republican primary challenger.